Russia (34 page)

In time, some Circassians, like the Tatars and Bashkirs before them, were recruited into the Russian army and were even shown off in the capital like a particularly exotic, colourful imperial trophy. Martha Wilmont, later Lady Londonderry, who lived in St Petersburg with the Princess Dashkova, who had been an intimate of Catherine the Great, for five years from 1803, described ‘a small group of Circassians, wild looking people with mail caps, scarlet shirts, armour and long spears, looking like warriors of old’ leading a St Petersburg parade, displacing even contingents of the elite Chevalier Guards.
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However, their feuding passions did not diminish. ‘Revenge wrote a visitor to the western Caucasus in the 1830s, ‘is with them paramount to every other consideration; no wealth can purchase forbearance, no entreaty for mercy can avert the blow; blood must be requited alone by blood; for when a Caucasian falls, hundreds of his comrades vow to avenge his death, and until that vow is accomplished, their hearts are steeled to every pleading of pity or humanity.’

The Chechens were an even harder case than the Circassians. Their upright bearing, handsome looks and eagle-beak noses fitted a Romantic image of the noble savage and was to help them win friends in mid-nineteenth-century England, but back in the 1790s the naturalist Peter Pallas had thought them to be ‘the most turbulent, hostile, and predatory inhabitants of the mountains … [and] without exception the worst of neighbours on the lines of the Caucasus’.
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Even more savage than their neighbours, they were little inclined to work, and fanatical.
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Their elite (there was also an underclass of captive slaves) was carefully schooled in the martial arts from infancy. Entrusted to a tutor-cum-guardian
(usden)
from outside the family, a boy would be taught how to ride, use arms, steal and to conceal his thefts. ‘He is afterwards led to more considerable and
dangerous robberies, and does not return to his father’s home until his cunning, his address, and his strength are supposed to be perfect.’ Until then his tutor received nine-tenths of his loot.

Lacking other occupation or income apart from what meagre crops their slaves could grow for them, it is hardly surprising that the Chechens should have become professional robbers. As they lived close to the main artery connecting Russia with Georgia and the rest of Transcaucasia, the Russian government, whose trade and communications they threatened, had no choice but to deal with them. War with the Chechens could therefore be regarded as inevitable. Nevertheless, the threat the Russians posed to their traditional way of life — the introduction of laws which reduced the power of the mountain princes; the ban of the slave trade, from which the mountain peoples had profited since times beyond memory — deepened the Chechens’ hostility. They could not remember a time when they had not exported girls to Istanbul, took pride whenever one was taken into the harem of some potentate, and always hoped that one might be taken for the Sultan himself. The mountain men were of the stuff that myths are made. In their white, shaggy sheepskin hats they seemed to be ‘of gigantic height’; their expression was wild, and each was armed to the teeth with gun, axe, dagger and steel-barbed ‘club that might have served Hercules’.
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For Circassians and Chechens alike the laws of feud were extreme, and hard as iron. And they applied them ruthlessly to their struggle with the Russians.

On the mountaineers’ side the war was total, fought to the death. Baddeley described an encounter relatively early in the war, when the Chechen village of Dadi-Yurt was attacked. Since every house was guarded by a high stone wall, it had to be to be pounded by artillery and kept under relentless small-arms fire. Once a breach was made, soldiers rushed in, but were met in the dark by Chechens wielding daggers. ‘Some of the natives, seeing defeat to be inevitable, slaughtered their wives and children … Many of the women threw themselves onto … [the soldiers] knife in hand, or in despair leaped into the burning buildings and perished in the flames.’ The Russian commander proposed a parley, but the answer, given by a half-naked Chechen, black with smoke, was ‘We want no quarter.’ ‘Orders were now given to fire the houses from all sides. The sun had set, and the picture of destruction and ruin was lighted only by the red glow of the flames. The Chechens, firmly resolved to die, set up their death-song, loud at first, but sinking lower and lower as their numbers diminished.’ Eventually some broke out, preferring to die from bullets or the bayonet rather than burn to death. Some Dagestanis who were with them were
captured, but ‘not one Chechen was taken alive.’ Seventy-two men ‘ended their lives in the flames.’
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Casualty rates in such a war are inevitably high, and on the Chechen side they included women. The demographic effect on the Chechens — who numbered about 150,000, of whom 60,000 were adult males
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- was manifest, and the wars eventually reduced the mountain population sufficiently to allow the survivors to subsist without robbery. So resistance abated. Yermolov’s methods had apparently worked, and his successor, General Rosen, managed to quell the Chechens and quieten Dagestan. But the lull proved only temporary.

The great Chechen leader Shamyl had recognized the demographic problem, and set out to counter it by encouraging younger marriages. As the population recovered, the fundamentalist Murid creed, which had arisen in Dagestan but had spread to Chechnya in the 1820s, gained adherents. Governed by their imam, they saw it as their overriding purpose to die in battle against the infidel, and the war flared up again. The Russian state had long experience of accommodating Islam, but Muridism — puritanical and fiercely anti-Western — was a new force to contend with.

The Russian advance through the Caucasus and into Persia threatened to restrict the operation of Muslim law and led to some mosques being appropriated and converted to other uses. The Russian advance was therefore perceived as a threat to Islam, and this intensified the conflict. So did the conversion of those among the mountain peoples who had hitherto remained heathens.

In 1830 mountain men, fired by Muridism, began to raid the Cossack lines along the Terek, and even threatened Vladikavkaz at the southern approach to the main pass across the central Caucasus. But steps were already being taken to shore up the south’s defences for the longer as well as the shorter term. From 1829 free peasants were allowed to move south and enlist as Terek Cossacks. Runaway serfs under the age of thirty-five apprehended in the southern provinces were transported to the Terek to work for them and to build the necessary infrastructure for projected settlements. Eighteen months later, for a limited period, townsmen were also allowed to enlist as Cossacks, either on the Terek or in the adjacent Astrakhan Cossack Host. Thanks to these and other measures General Veliaminov eventually succeeded in quietening the Caucasus for the remainder of the 1830s
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, but in the early 1840s the region caught fire yet again.

Some time before that, the British had begun to exploit the situation. They were prompted by the threat to their imperial interests posed by Russia’s recent expansion in Asia following the defeat of the Persian army
by General Ivan Paskevich, who had succeeded Yermolov, in December 1826. The following summer Paskevich had taken Nakhichevan and advanced on Tabriz. Under the terms of the subsequent Russo-Persian peace treaty, Russia annexed Yerevan, Nakhichevan and the territory north of the river Aras. This territorial gain put the Russians within striking distance of Tabriz, then the Persian capital. Beyond Tabriz lay the road to Baghdad. The treaty also guaranteed Russia a monopoly of trade and shipping on the Caspian, ensured Persian neutrality in any Russian war with Turkey and secured the famous Ardebil Library, with its precious Persian and Islamic manuscripts, for St Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas having professed an interest in Islam. London and Paris, as well as Istanbul, found the treaty’s provisions disturbing.

Russia’s victory over the Turks in the war of 1828—9 deepened their disquiet. Although most of territory occupied during the hostilities was returned, according to the Treaty of Edirne the frontier was moved south to include the entire Danube delta and Akhalkalaki, which rounded out the frontier of southern Georgia. The fact that Russia’s troops had actually taken both Tabriz and Erzurum during the war suggests forbearance in concluding the peace, but Russia’s non-territorial gains were considerable: open access to Danube and to the Mediterranean through the Straits, the right to trade throughout the Ottoman Empire, and reparations which helped retrospectively to finance the wars — 10 million ducats from the Turks, and the equivalent of £3 million from the Persians.
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Russia’s strategic position was improved even beyond that. In Europe Russia gained the lasting goodwill of the Greeks for having made the largest military contribution to securing an independent Greek state, and of Serbs for gaining autonomy for the pashalic of Belgrade, core of the infant state of Serbia; and its troops remained in the Romanian principalities, where the elite and the Orthodox Church looked to the Tsar for protection. With access to the Mediterranean, influence in the Balkans, and command of most
of
the high ground on the frontiers with Turkey and Persia, Russia’s southern provinces seemed secure and set for prosperity.

By the early 1830s Odessa, with its capacious harbour, was fast becoming the dynamic, cosmopolitan emporium of the south. Populated by ‘Russians, French, Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Turks, Tatars, Americans, English, etc. — all eagerly prosecuting their commercial concerns in this free city’, it was already a handsome town of some 25,000 inhabitants with stone buildings lining spacious, if as yet unpaved, streets, fashionable shops, French restaurants and ‘a public garden, laid out in the English style … [which was] a favourite resort of the citizens in fair
weather’. Rational plans for its enlargement and improvement had been devised by no less a figure than the émigré duc de Richelieu.
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Another of the Empire’s cities, Tiflis, capital of Georgia, presented contrasts of a different kind.

The quarter inhabited by Russians … [wrote an earnest German visitor in the middle of the century] has a perfectly European look: straight streets, rows of modern houses, elegant shops, milliners and apothecaries, even a bookseller, with cafes, public buildings, a Government palace, churches with cupolas and towers, the various Russian military uniforms with French pal-itots and frock-coats, quite transported us back to Europe. But where this European town ends, one of a perfectly Asian character begins, with bazaars, caravanserais, and long streets, in which the various trades are carried on in open shops … A row of smithies, the men hammering away at their anvils… Another row … where tailors are seated at work … After these … shoemakers, furriers, etc….

The population is no less varied and interesting: here Tatars… in another part, thin, sunburnt Persians with loose, flowing dresses. Koords, with a bold and enterprising look; Lezghis and Circassians engaged in their traffic of horses; lastly the beautiful Georgian women, with long flowing veils and high-heeled slippers; nearly all the population displaying a beauty of varied character, which no other country can exhibit - an effect heightened by the parti-coloured, picturesque, and beautiful costumes. In no place are both the contrasts and the connecting links between Europe and Asia found in the same immediate juxtaposition as in Tiflis.
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However Russia’s imperialist rivals, Britain and France, were uneasy about Russia’s new ascendancy at the gates to Asia, and the threat it posed to Ottoman Turkey. If Russia should succeed in unblocking the roads to the Levant and India, as seemed quite possible, they would be the losers. Hence Whitehall’s change of policy from one of friendship towards Russia following the Napoleonic Wars, to watchfulness in the 1820s and ‘30s, and finally to open hostility by the early 1850s. But the Crimean War was heralded in the 1830s by a proxy conflict in the Caucasus.

David Urquhart, part-time diplomat and anti-Russian publicist, was active from an early stage in this secret war. In 1834, unnoticed by the Russians, he landed at the Black Sea harbour of Anapa not far from the entrance to the Sea of Azov. His purpose was to make contact with Circassian chiefs of the western Caucasian highlands, known to be hostile to Russia, and to encourage them to create a national independence movement. The outcome was a
‘Declaration of Circassian Independence Addressed to the Courts of Europe’. The appeal went straight to the hearts of Westerners of romantic disposition - as it was calculated to do, with its child-like assertion of outraged innocence, its hyperbole, its heroic assertiveness against the odds. These Circassians represented themselves as fundamentally

honest and peaceable … but we hate the Russians with good cause, and almost always beat them [despite the fact that] we have no artillery, generals, ships or riches. Russia tells the West that the Circassians are her slaves, or wild bandits and savages whom … no laws can restrain … [But] we most solemnly protest in the face of heaven against such womanish arts and falsehood …

We are four millions [they declared], having unfortunately been divided into many tribes, languages and creeds … We have hitherto never had one purpose … But we are now at last united all as one man in hatred to Russia.
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Two years later, thanks to Urquhart’s intervention a British schooner, the
Vixen,
belonging to George Bell & Son, slipped into a little port further down the coast. The idea was to connect the Circassians with the Danube and Turkish territory, which was their source of gunpowder and their market for slaves. But in 1837 a Russian gunboat, the
Ajax,
intercepted it and impounded it at Sevastopol. Urquhart evidently hoped that Palmerston, the British prime minister of the day, might use the incident as a
casus belli,
but Palmerston would not rise to the bait.